With every passing year, I lose a little bit more respect for the awards given at the prestigious Cannes film festival, especially it's highest honour - the Palme d'Or. First it was Micheal Haneke's The White Ribbon last year and now this film in 2010. While both these are definetly not bad films, there were, however, much superior films in competition for the award.
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who is already considered one of the best directors from Thailand, the film does not have a plot nor does it have any sort of narrative structure but instead you get lots of weird, surreal imagery, which would not have been a problem if it had any meaning or purpose like say, Shinya Tsukamoto's Tesuo or Cronenberg's Videodrome. But there is none.
Normally, in a film review, you get a brief summary of what the film is about But for this film, it's incredibly hard to write one because, as I've already mentioned, the film lacks a plot. All we know is that Uncle Boonmee is dying and a couple of his relatives are visiting him. The first 20 minutes of the film is surprisingly creepy, especially, a dinner table scene but from then on it becomes completely incomprehensible.
Allow me to describe a few scenes from the film to prove my point.
Scene 1 - In the above mentioned dinner table scene, we see Uncle Boonmee's son, who has been missing for years, return as, what the subtitles called a 'Monkey Ghost', in a bad ape outfit with red glowing eyes and tell his father that he became this 'Monkey Ghost' because he had once fornicated with a female 'Monkey Ghost'.
Scene 2 - A princess with a facial deformation, who might be in love with one of her servants, is pleasured by a talking catfish.
Scene 3 - In a montage made from only still photographs, several soldiers are seen with a 'Monkey Ghost', who may or may not be Uncle Boonmee's son, while, in a voice-over Uncle Boonmee talks about time travel.
Do these scenes mean anything? Was Uncle Boonmee the princess in one of his past lives? Was he the catfish? Maybe he was the servant or maybe he was the waterfall or maybe everything is part of his time-travel dream. I don't know and I don't think anybody does. You might be thinking that these scenes might actually mean something in the context of the entire film, but I guarantee that watching the film will not help you make better sense of the scenes that I just described.
Now, a film so weird should actually, not be boring. You should actually be able to derive some enjoyment out of the unexpected craziness of the film but unfortunately that's not the case here.The other major problem with the film is that these scenes are so few and far between it's 2 hour running time that it even becomes difficult to enjoy the movie for it's weirdness and absurdity. Other than the scenes described above, most of rest of the film consists of long scenes of people walking, discussing dung beetle and honey larvae and Uncle Boonmee's dialysis.
There are strengths to the film. It is undeniably a beautiful film to look at and it is a well made film and you can definetly see why Apichatpong Weerasethakul is regarded so highly. Even though the movie is impossible to make sense of, there is a certain level of sincerity in what he does and given that Uncle Boonmee has been the subject of three (as far as I know) of his works, I am sure that he knew what he was making and that the film makes sense in his head.
If you are looking for a plot, characters and some entertainment, you will have to look elsewhere. Recommended mainly for insomniacs and pretentious film snobs.
RATING :
No comments:
Post a Comment